Bren Simmers, Hastings-Sunrise Friday night at Hastings Park. Our beer in plastic cups. Pre-race, the announcer tells us to look for a big ass, a line of muscle along the abs as horses bounce and prance past patio tables, retirees with circled stats, hipsters in fedoras, weekend warriors, families and first-timers craving novelty. The regulars drink inside, beer rings stamped on betting slips. Bred for impulse, live-feed TVs. Minutes till the starting gun, exam hush as their pencils wager cubicle earnings against Luck of the Devil. A flurry of hunches before crack. Cramped on their saddles, Jockeys jack-in-the-box. Horses try to outrun whips. Call it sport or 9 to 5 odds I can’t watch. Close my eyes. A wall of noise at the finish line. Squamish, British Columbia poet Bren Simmers adds her voice to the poetic geography of Vancouver through her second poetry collection, Hastings-Sunrise (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2015). Every time another poetry collection on and around Vancouver social geographies emerges, I’m amazed at the growing list of authors who have articulated that …

rob mclennan a review of: Undercurrent By Rita Wong Nightwood Editions ISBN 978-0-88971-308-6 both the ferned & the furry, the herbaceous & the human, can call the ocean our ancestor. our blood plasma sings the composition of seawater. roughly half a billion years ago, ocean reshaped some of its currents into fungi, flora & fauna that left their marine homes & learned to exchange bodily fluids on land. spreading like succulents & stinging nettles, our salty-wet bodies refilled their fluids through an eating that is also always drinking. hypersea is a story of how we rearrange our oceanic selves on land. we are liquid matrix, streaming & recombining through ingestic one another, as a child swallows a juicy plum, as a beaver chews on tree, as a hare inhales a patch of moist, dewy clover. what do we return to the ocean that let us loose on land? we are animals moving extracted & excreted minerals into the ocean without plan or precaution, making dead zones though we are capable of life. (“BORROWED WATERS: …

Fall Workshops At A Glance The Poetry Project Application Deadline: September 30, 2015 A 20-week program designed for the advanced poet who wants to put together a collection of poems. Through in-class exercises, lectures, workshopping by peers and instructor you will work on your poems to make them shine and ready for publication. We will examine the pros and cons of self-publishing vs. mainstream publishing, and Spoken Word. The course will focus on questions related to poetry creation, poetic forms, and the creative process from initial writing to a thematic collection. We will explore questions around narration, theme, setting and character, and work toward creating a chapbook as a final product of the class More information 8 Week Course Mapping a Novel (3 Seats Available) Instructor: Anne Metikosh | Thursdays 7-9pm | Begins October 8, 2015 Members: $180 | Non-Members: $240 (includes membership) You have a great idea. Maybe you’ve dreamed up some dynamite settings and scenes. But how do you turn all the bits and pieces into a novel? You know you need an …

Jordan Simpson a review of: House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski Pantheon Books ISBN: 0-375-70376-4 Reading Mark Z. Danielewski’s “novel” House of Leaves (Feb 29, 2000) is a lot like looking at one of famed Dutch artist M.C. Escher’s lithographs, while trying to solve a Rubik’s cube, while speaking a foreign language—backwards. And this is just the book’s design. At its essence, the book’s layout, format, and even—correction, especially—typography refuse to allow it to be read in a sane manner. Take for instance Scott Wampler of BadassDigest.com, who upon meeting Danielewski asked him for any advice in decrypting the novel’s more esoteric features. Danielewski replied, ‘”I’ll give you this hint: if you ever really want to get to the bottom of things, you’ll need to use a protractor and compass while reading the book.’” Spooky. Even in writing this review, it’s simply a hard book to explain or summarize, and a challenge to the very concept of what a book’s “supposed” to be. House of Leaves is about, yes a house, but more importantly a …